Books, Culture And The History Of Ideas
Should public libraries act as they repositories of our culture, our history, our thoughts and ideas as a civilization or should they cater to pop culture? According to the Washington Post, it is increasingly the latter. Libraries are ruthlessly dumping books that have not been checked out frequently enough in an arbitrary period of time.
You can't find "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" at the Fairfax City Regional Library anymore. Or "The Education of Henry Adams" at Sherwood Regional. Want Emily Dickinson's "Final Harvest"? Don't look to the Kingstowne branch.
It's not that the books are checked out. They're just gone. No one was reading them, so librarians took them off the shelves and dumped them.
Along with those classics, thousands of novels and nonfiction works have been eliminated from the Fairfax County collection after a new computer software program showed that no one had checked them out in at least 24 months.
Public libraries have always weeded out old or unpopular books to make way for newer titles. But the region's largest library system is taking turnover to a new level.
Like Borders and Barnes & Noble, Fairfax is responding aggressively to market preferences, calculating the system's return on its investment by each foot of space on the library bookshelves — and figuring out which products will generate the biggest buzz. So books that people actually want are easy to find, but many books that no one is reading are gone — even if they are classics.
Having been forced to read enough books that were considered "classics" at the time, I sympathize to some extent. But a lot of the "popular" books of today are eminently forgettable. The idea that these books will actually have someone reading them in a year or two is pretty funny. But the libraries in some areas have chosen that path.
As much as I personally loathe Ernest Hemingway, his writings have been assigned to countless high schoolers through the years. We lose that (boring) commonality at our own peril.
Civilization, Media, News | Gaius Monday, 1 January , 2007
Other Links to this Post
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Outside The Beltway | OTB — Tuesday, 2 January , 2007 @ 7:41 am
By Jack Gunter, Jr., Tuesday, 2 January , 2007 @ 8:36 pm
Dumping Hemingway for Grisham is like dumping your fine china in order to eat out of your toilet.
Sure, your drink comes free and clean up is a breeze, but have you really consumed anything worth eating?
By Gaius, Tuesday, 2 January , 2007 @ 8:43 pm
Heh.
A couple of people took exception to my post today. But when I was growing up, the library was the only place I could get books to read other than at school. I could not afford to buy them, nor could my mother. I would not have been able to read all that I did under this program. (I read some very unpopular stuff.)